Which Of These Two He
Prefers, A Man With Any Youth Still Left In Him Will Decide Rightly
For Himself.
He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key;
rather go without food than partake of stalled ox in stiff,
respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his
life according to the dictates of the world.
He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness,
the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of
country towns. A few wild story-books which delighted his
childhood form the imaginative basis of his picture of America. In
course of time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating
details - vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds,
that have gone south in autumn, returning with the spring to find
thousands camped upon their marshes, and the lamps burning far and
near along populous streets; forests that disappear like snow;
countries larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man
running forth with his household gods before another, while the
bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil
that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the
brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage,
action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has
seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious
verses.
Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York
streets, spying for things foreign. The place had to me an air of
Liverpool; but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would
have looked inviting. We were a party of four, under two
umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots lads, recent immigrants, and
not indisposed to welcome a compatriot. They had been six weeks in
New York, and neither of them had yet found a single job or earned
a single halfpenny. Up to the present they were exactly out of
pocket by the amount of the fare.
The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such
a dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at
which I should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and I
should dine like heathen emperors. I set to work, asking after a
restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-
looking passers-by to ask from. Yet, although I had told them I
was willing to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to
cheap, fixed-price houses, where I would not have eaten that night
for the cost of twenty dinners. I do not know if this were
characteristic of New York, or whether it was only Jones and I who
looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising suggestions. But at
length, by our own sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where
there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called
French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole.
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